We have only to add that the affairs of the captain
have been satisfactorily arranged with the War Department,
and that he is actually in service at Fort Gibson,
on our western frontier, where we hope he may meet
with further opportunities of indulging his peculiar
tastes, and of collecting graphic and characteristic
details of the great western wilds and their motley
inhabitants.

We here close our picturings of the Rocky Mountains
and their wild inhabitants, and of the wild life that
prevails there; which we have been anxious to fix
on record, because we are aware that this singular
state of things is full of mutation, and must soon
undergo great changes, if not entirely pass away.
The fur trade itself, which has given life to all
this portraiture, is essentially evanescent.
Rival parties of trappers soon exhaust the streams,
especially when competition renders them heedless
and wasteful of the beaver. The furbearing animals
extinct, a complete change will come over the scene;
the gay free trapper and his steed, decked out in wild
array, and tinkling with bells and trinketry; the
savage war chief, plumed and painted and ever on the
prowl; the traders’ cavalcade, winding through
defiles or over naked plains, with the stealthy war
party lurking on its trail; the buffalo chase, the
hunting camp, the mad carouse in the midst of danger,
the night attack, the stampede, the scamper, the fierce
skirmish among rocks and cliffs—­all this
romance of savage life, which yet exists among the
mountains, will then exist but in frontier story,
and seem like the fictions of chivalry or fairy tale.

Some new system of things, or rather some new modification,
will succeed among the roving people of this vast
wilderness; but just as opposite, perhaps, to the
inhabitants of civilization. The great Chippewyan
chain of mountains, and the sandy and volcanic plains
which extend on either side, are represented as incapable
of cultivation. The pasturage which prevails
there during a certain portion of the year, soon withers
under the aridity of the atmosphere, and leaves nothing
but dreary wastes. An immense belt of rocky mountains
and volcanic plains, several hundred miles in width,
must ever remain an irreclaimable wilderness, intervening
between the abodes of civilization, and affording a
last refuge to the Indian. Here roving tribes
of hunters, living in tents or lodges, and following
the migrations of the game, may lead a life of savage
independence, where there is nothing to tempt the cupidity
of the white man. The amalgamation of various
tribes, and of white men of every nation, will in
time produce hybrid races like the mountain Tartars
of the Caucasus. Possessed as they are of immense
droves of horses should they continue their present
predatory and warlike habits, they may in time become
a scourge to the civilized frontiers on either side
of the mountains, as they are at present a terror
to the traveller and trader.

The facts disclosed in the present work clearly manifest
the policy of establishing military posts and a mounted
force to protect our traders in their journeys across
the great western wilds, and of pushing the outposts
into the very heart of the singular wilderness we have
laid open, so as to maintain some degree of sway over
the country, and to put an end to the kind of “blackmail,”
levied on all occasions by the savage “chivalry
of the mountains.”